Tag / mental illness

We’re rewatching all of Dawson’s Creek in honor of its twentieth anniversary. Will require some mind-numbing. Drinking game rules can be found here.

2×19 “Abby Morgan, Rest In Peace”

By Nerdy Spice

In this episode, everyone deals with the most awkward kind of death: the death of a person you really didn’t like.

Dawson and Joey are fresh off their wedding make-out sesh when they find out about Abby’s death. Joey, of course, immediately begins to think of her mom. Joey has repressed her feelings about her mom’s death for three years, which a) explains why she’s constantly mentioning it at inappropriate times since she hasn’t worked through it and b) explains why she represses all her other strong feelings, ya know, like her love for Pacey next season.

Joseph March, the hero of Alexander Maksik’s novel Shelter In Place, has two problems: tar, and a bird. The tar is the black, creeping heaviness of his depression, which comes along with periods of mania; the bird is the painful part, the part that pierces his chest. He has bipolar disorder (or rather has something unnamed that, with its cycles from up to down, resembles it), and he’s constantly haunted by his own, inexplicable, internal rhythms of pain and joy. Alexander Maksik has lit upon a perfect metaphor for severe depression.